Coporate culture

I like to see how people work, how they attend to customers, and how they treat their customers.

I am particularly interested in observing retail outlets.

Through my limited and often unscientific observations, I noticed that those who induced me to come again, ie revisiting, is the passion of the staff of a given outlet.

Most of the time we tell ourselves, if you have a good product, it should then selling like hot cake. Often this fall short when we failed to recognize the front line may just screw up even we have the best products.

I have been shopping and dining out regularly, my unscientific findings dictates where I will be going next trip.

Corporate culture is, in my opinion, the single most important factor whether the customer will come back.

Corporate culture will result in customer satisfaction and good experience. Corporate culture will also drive staff to be passionate on their job, and hence influencing customers into passionate about their products and services.

However, having a great corporate culture does not mean success if it is not implemeted and throughoutly understood by everyone in the company.

Give an example:

A hypermarket located in a prominent area in KL, has knowledgeable, friendly, and accurate staff. This is the hypermarket I would choose to shop if I am near the area.

However, another hypermarket under the same company, located outskirt of KL, is the place I will avoid if possible.

Both are selling identical products, both share the same corporate culture, but one gives better shopping experience than the other. This leads me to realize that it is not only the culture, but implementation and participation of staff is important.

Workers are generally working for food on the table. How one can drive workers to believe and wholeheartedly work for a company boils down to management style of respective managers. This is pretty human.

Another example:

A donuts outlet located outskirts of KL surprised my wife and me.

The outlet is preparing to close and call it a day, but the workers are still
Inviting us to place order, even to the extend of explaining to us what different flavour of donuts are.

Of course, we bought some eventually. Yes, I have to confess that the donuts are good, but what drove us into buying the product is not the quality, but the passion of the workers who are so willingly defer closing the outlet just wanted to share with us their great products.

This lead me to think about some around my circle, who seems to have perception that certain races will not work better than some race, ie Chinese.

Obviously those who have such thinking are Chinese.

I see it otherwise. A good and throughoutly understood corporate culture with effective implementation will certainly induce workers to work towards the corporate goal. And often, the success of a corporation is largely relying on customer experience and satisfaction. This is certainly has nothing to do with color of the skin, or background of a worker.

If the management failed to let the workers be passionate of what they are doing, they failed!